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Eow Links 22 |
| 2021-05-30 |
Eow Links 22
"Eow" for End Of Week. Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 22.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection or Alex's Blogosphere posts.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a RPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
Heterogeneous week.
The game involves a hex crawl through the unexplored interior of Africa, and seems at least partly inspired by "Outdoor Survival", although contents of individual hexes are randomly determined, and so differ from game to game (and an actual map of Africa).
Heart of Darkness.
What The Rulebook Didn’t Include: Gumshoe (Part 1 of 2)
Gumshoe isn’t as trad as it might look at first glance. The system is frequently coupled with mysteries, a tough genre for many GMs to handle well when torn between creating an interesting investigation and time for meaningful characterization.
Review: Izirions West Marches Location Deck
a gorgeous DM screen and a region-building card deck that is a fantastic tool for generating wilderness locations and encounters.
Those cards look amazing, a Environment card standing tall with Region Feature cards connected to it. Food for imagination.
Getting to know Traveller 5 – Part II
Now on to the fight. To attack in a close quarters hand-to-hand fight, one needs to subtract the defenders melee number (DMN) from the attackers melee number (AMN) and roll 2D under the resulting target number.
A small solo adventure/fight example, where we learn about Marc Miller's ROARN rule: Resolve Only As Really Necessary.
[Review] A Thousand Dead Babies (NGR/OSR); Rustic Charm
Zzarchov Kowolski, as I am in the habit of saying, is underrated. He was one of the guys in the background of Lotfp in its hayday, doing silent work while the A-listers were preening in the foreground, and managed to churn out quite a few adventures ranging from solid to downright groundbreaking.
Zzarchov has a Patreon page incidentally.
What Does The Game Bring To The Table?
This is not really meant to be a trite explanatory article. The fact that things as elemental as game mechanics are unimportant to some RPG buyers confound other hobbyists, to the point that some portions of the board game hobby are actively hostile to TTRPGs
Must read. Twice.
Ø2\‘3|| is LIVE (buy this book?)
The setting is Europe in the year 2081, unified under one totalitarian party called The Family. The United States of Europe (USE, for short) are a playground for all the bad ideas this century has already come up with (and some of the classics from the last 100 years). Citizens are rated by an arbitrary and mean Social Status system, puberty blockers are mandatory for all but the Elites. All of this is shrouded through a huge media ruse: reality is hidden behind a fully augmented and gamified layer, maintained by an AI implanted at birth and controlled by The Family. Citizens never grow up, just grow older and if they aren't high in social status, they are bled and used for everything they have, most of the time without even realizing it. That veil is lifted for some, and with that comes resistance (or opportunity)
Ø2\‘3|| is still coming! (now for sure AND soon)
Since it's all playing in a dystopian future, there's also a full blown system for social media interaction that has a strong impact on a character's social standing.
Oh, this looks nice and depressing at the same time.
Powered by the Apocalypse, Part 7: Q&A Round 1 - lumpley games
These are games that create the illusion of consent, make consent into a trap: you agree to follow the rules, but then the emergent systems turn on you, putting you in a bind between your agreement to your friends on the one hand, and your consent to what’s happening on the other.
Complete with diagrams.
Scepter'd Isle: Lamentations of the Flame Princess in Elizabethan England
Anyhow, here's the plan: Lamentations of the Flame Princess set at some point in the reign of Elizabeth I (1559-1603), with the possibility of continuing into the Stuart era after that.
Excellent, a "delta" of a setting. Take a starting point setting, enumerate a few differences to define a new setting.
Minimalist D&D XI - the three classes
No saving throws (you probably roll against the target's abilities). No skills (only skill sets the expert can get). No fighting styles. No weapon or armor restrictions (if you can pay for it and carry it, go for it). We are ditching EVERYTHING but abilities and a few features.
I'm talking about the ability of classed fighters to get a large number of attacks against very weak opponents -- traditionally 1 hit die or less. (...) In conversations in that show and afterward, it's turned out -- to my great surprise -- that some form of the rule has been in the core books of every single numbered edition.
